Sympathy For The Villain

(A dramatic monologue from Django-Ra who casts a long shadow, but does not live beyond the Prologue of Knight's Fork)

Allow me to introduce myself...
I am the god-Prince Django-Ra. To my face, you should call me "Your Highness" or "Sir". Behind my back, I presume you will call me "Django" pronounced "Jan-GO"... The D- of Royal names is silent.

So, little Earthling, you are cautiously curious about me.

Know, then, that I am exceptionally gifted and exceedingly dangerous. I can read or wipe minds with ridiculous ease, just as I am reading yours. I play god-level chess, and am one of the most formidable Duplicate Bridge players in all the galaxies. Certainly I cheat. A god-Prince must be seen to win!

What's that? Ah, yes! You may well wonder whether or not I can read the mind of my favorite great niece, Electra-Djerroldina, the Volnoths' queen. She wears the most perplexing… Hah! but I will not tell you.

As you see, I enjoy excellent health –yes, sexual vigor, also—despite my advanced years. In my day, I was a superb star-fighter pilot with many kills to my credit... and to my discredit. Friendly fire is such a useful expression, isn't it?

Of course I have killed friends. And family. And lovers. We all do. It is inevitable. The Djinn bloodline is almost extinct. There are desperately few full Djinn females left for us to fight over. Those that there are, are taken. Alas! Which leaves lesser beings such as yourself, whose innards are not strong enough to endure multiple impregnations by a Great Djinn.

You are skeptical! Consider my great-nephew, the Crown Prince Tarrant-Arragon. He searched the galaxies for gestates. Yes, gestates. In our World, we measure time by the female cycle, and by the duration of a Royal pregnancy. His new Mate –or "wife"—is half-Earthling. He is beside himself with worry that she may not survive the birth of his heir.

Have I confused you? Every book has a genealogical table either in the front or at the back. Or visit the official family tree at http://www.rowenacherry.com/familytree It is…ah, economical with the truth. My own bastards, for instance, are not attributed to me.

Why do I do… what I do? I daresay I have bad Djinn genes. I enjoyed a deeply disturbing childhood. My twin brother died in what you would call his crib. I had nothing to do with his demise. It would have done me no good to expedite his departure from this life. We had vigorous, older half-brothers who were Heir Apparent and second in line to the Imperial throne, and it was beyond my strength and powers to remove them from my path.

Indeed, I was obliged to feign an interest in lesser-being members of my own sex in order to bask in the variable star-shine of my big brothers' tolerance. As long as they thought me "peculiar", they did not see me as a threat. Eventually, as you see, I...ah... outlived them.

Their untimely deaths brought me no particular joy. I did not get what I've always wanted.

What's that? I want to experience the Great Djinn rut rage. Earthling, do you understand what the rut-rage is? It is a drive, a sexual madness, a mating frenzy. Pure Great Djinn males, such as myself, have saturniid glands that can smell a full-Djinn female who is approaching oestrus from as many as fifty of your miles away. We then fixate upon that "scent love" sight unseen, and become obsessed with her.

Did I once have a "scent love"? Yes, but I never was in a position to claim her. My muscular half-brothers had Helispeta, consecutively. I, alas, would have gladly stood in line but Djohn Kronos and Devoron-Vitan made war over her, and Helispeta took sanctuary on your planet, Earth, beyond my reach. Not that she ever knew of my passion.

After she was lost to me, I tried to experience the rut-rage with others, even with my nephew's Empress, Tarragonia-Marietta, but met only with frustration. You may read my great nephew's love story, Forced Mate, and also Insufficient Mating Material for a less subtle view of my exploits.

Hmmmm. I believe I smell heightened excitement. My foolish, frivolous great-niece Martia-Djulia's forced Mating Ceremony must be about to begin. You will excuse me....


*****
Rowena here:

Just as I prefer my heroes to be slightly morally questionable, so I like my villains to be likeable --or at least entertaining-- when they want to be. As I wrote of Tarrant-Arragon (who is either hero or antagonist) his civilized veneer curls up at the edges.

Django-Ra is my most heinous villain. He and Helispeta saw the trouble begin in the electronic prequel Mating Net, and have seen it through Forced Mate, Insufficient Mating Material, and now into Knight's Fork. That's why I chose dramatic monologue by him to introduce you to his wicked world of the Tiger god-Princes of Tigron.

Some villains are too interesting to be killed off. But, if it seems that a happy ending depends upon their death, who is to do the deed? Can the heroine remain a romantic heroine if she kills the villain? Is it acceptable if she kills the villain by accident, or in self-defense, or in defense of the hero or some other vulnerable character?

Princess Leia strangled Jabba The Hutt. That was cool. Eowen killed the undead Ringwraith King. That was cooler.

Ditto for the hero. There's not so much of a double standard about a hero's activities. He's usually a knight or high-ranking professional warrior. Nevertheless... Luke didn't. Aragorn didn't.

Is it a cop out if the villain is simply hoist by his own petard (which literally means blown up by his own bomb)? I don't think so. There is a certain satisfaction --a "thusness"-- to that turn of events.

What inspires my villains? Not just the exquisitely courteous arch-villains of the Bond movies. For me, the most memorably wicked villain in literature was the Duke in Robert Browning's poem "My Last Duchess". He doesn't make The Daily Telegraph's list of Literature's 50 greatest villains -- http://tinyurl.com/50-villains (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=A1YourView&xml=/arts/2008/09/20/bovillains120.xml) But then, nor do Djohn Kronos, or Django-Ra!






With thanks to Heather Massey whose Thursday November 6th post reminded me to see if Dorchester still was using the above.
http://thegalaxyexpress.blogspot.com/

Parallelism, Convergence, or something else

For the purposes of alien romance , tonight, I'm thinking about the three --or four-- reasons that romantically inclined aliens might look reasonably like us.

Convergence might be the most "fun". That is where a species evolves to look like another species, often a prey species, for a good and sufficient evolutionary reason. For instance, all the better to prey upon us.

Vampires might be a good example. The book "The Sparrow" had another cool example. Imagine a lion evolving to look a lot more like a wildebeest, so it could get really close to its prey without being noticed.

Parallelism is where different species evolve independently, but end up looking the same. We might like to think that this is because the design is the perfect adaptation.

Intelligent design, or divine intervention. One God --from outer space-- either liked the model so much that He --or She-- duplicated it. Or else, He --or She-- was not entirely satisfied, and created new and improved versions of the basic model.

Seeding... "gods from outer space" who were simply more technologically advanced, for whatever reason --not necessarily moral--, colonized, terraformed, performed cross-breeding experiments, and then went away (or didn't).

Of course, you could also have almost any combination of any of those, as in the case of the race of alien males whose own females have become sterile (or vice-versa) and therefore they abduct us, and as a result, evolve to look even more like us.

Have I missed anything out?

Happy Christmas!

Rowena Cherrry


alien romance

Chess-inspired ("mating") titles. Gods from outer space. Sexy SFR. Poking fun, (pun intended). Shameless word-play.

Cherry Picking

My real reason for blogging is to test the "Ping", however, since writing "Test" is too boring, I do have something useful to say.

Susan Kearney, one of the alien romance authors on this blog, will be one of my "Crazy Tuesday" guests on October 2nd, 10 am to noon, on my chaotic, unscripted "authors blogging aloud" show, talking about her book video for Kiss Me Deadly with Tammie King of Night Owl Romances.

Other authors with book videos will also chat about theirs, and I will hope for an opportunity to mention my own alien romances videos in passing.

http://www.nightowlromance.com/nightowlromance/BookFlicks/bfclip.asp?FlickId=12

Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Shapeshifters of the sea

Although my head is in outer space --where else?-- as I struggle to meet an extended deadline for the fourth of my alien romances KNIGHT'S FORK (Prince Djarrhett's story, which takes up where INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL left off), I'm also counting down to an internet radio special.

What kind of sexy, inter-species-loving aliens prowl in the icy blackness of our deepest seas?

In celebration of Sea Otter Awareness week, the "Cherry Picking" occasional show will run from 9.00 pm (Eastern Time) until midnight on Sunday 23rd September. We will be talking about shapeshifters of the seas and the environmental issues that affect their lives, their food chain, their passions.

Alyssa Day,
Jeff Dwyer,
Barbara Karmazin,
Marjorie M Liu,
Deborah MacGillivray,
Jacquie Rogers
Skylar Sinclair,
Dawn Thompson,

will be joining Rowena Cherry to speculate about selkie, dolphin-men, sea otters, sea lions, man-whales, and other salty sea-lords who make a splash in the midnight surf....

or wild wet hunks that go hump in the night, if you prefer.

Find out how to tune in for this, and all PIVTR programming at

http://internetvoicesradio.com/Rowena.htm

With best wishes and apologies for the promo,

Rowena
Http://www.rowenacherry.com
http://www.internetvoicesradio.com/CrazyTuesday.htm

Different Strokes -- Headless sex

We're used to having one of everything, (unless we have two... as in kidneys, lungs, arms, legs, ears, eyes).

Margaret and I like to watch some of the same things on TV. I will definitely stop writing my alien romances to watch "The Most Extreme" or "Fooled By Nature" on Animal Planet.

It's not that I'm particularly twisted (or so I fondly imagine), but I am interested in watching male animals getting their heads chewed while they do their reproductive duty. I understand that male praying mantises have a second heart --or is it a second brain?-- down there, which is what enables them to pump more vigorously once the head is gone.

I wonder whether they fornicate faster because the blood flow is diverted to the second brain or second heart once the big head no longer needs a supply. I like to know the ins and outs, and the hows and whys! Like, dying trees often produce a vast and vigorous quantity of flowers and seeds.

I've heard that Brachiosaurs (long necked dinosaur types) may have had an extra heart to pump blood along that long neck. Do giraffes? Or do giraffes just have a really efficient sequence of valves... like canal locks?

When I watch elephants and other large quadrupeds with extremely stiff spines and highly mobile (and apparently well-controlled) reproductive equipment go about the business of procreation, I cannot help thinking of some of the building supply equipment I see on the road... the sort that has a driver in the cab at the front end, but a little cab with a crane and control center at the back end to do the delicate work of lifting and maneuvering.

Have you ever watched an elephantine erection in action? Remarkable!

In National Geographic for Kids, there's a delightful article about animals being nice to one another. In one story, a forest elephant gets the sensitive tip of its trunk damaged in a hunter's trap. So, it leaves the forest and goes out onto the savannah (usually forest elephants stay in the forest, and savannah elephants stay on the savannah, and as a result of not socializing their ears have evolved to look different... apparently). The forest elephant walks up to a surprised savannah elephant and pushes the tip of its hurt trunk into the savannah elephant's mouth.

At once, the savannah elephant tastes the blood, understands his fellow's plight (they must both be young male elephants, I assume, or they would not be alone) and uses his own trunk to pull up a small tree and thrust it into his new friend's mouth.
Aaaahhhh!

There's not a lot of use for me in thinking further about sensitive, prehensile trunk tips and other applications because I write romance with alien elements.

My aliens do have secondary brains and hearts... one has to have a rationale why priapism isn't a problem during the

rut rage

, for the few readers who wonder about such things. One of these days I really must ask my friend Jade Lee (the author) how practitioners of 17-hour Tantric sex don't damage themselves. In my next book, I also touch on the problems of having more brain than humans.

By the way... if anyone clicked the "watch elephants" link in this blog, and is now furious with me for sending them to the INSUFFICIENT MATING MATERIAL book trailer (which is also on my newly rationalized website), try looking to the right in the sidebar of what YouTube catalogues as similar subject matter.

On an administrative note, Cindy Holby aka Colby Hodge is on assignment. I shall blog on her Saturdays until September... apart from August 4th, when Marjorie M Liu will blog.

Barbara Karmazin will be guest blogging on Sundays, and will delight us with at least one lecture about alien sex. We can look forward to a hot summer! The hero in Barbara's The Huntress is extraordinarily well endowed. He has two!!


best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Battling Backyard Aliens

You think I don't have any?
I do!

I've been battling some of them for four years at great personal cost! Not in terms of my own limbs... have you guessed where I'm going with this? Poison and fertiliser and strategically applied water are my weapons of choice against the alien invader.

My alien invader is green, with very large, dark almond shaped eyes, and a sinister mien. His brow ridge make him appear to frown menacingly at me. His body is long, and green. He has a body-armored thorax, an well defined abodomen (not a six-pack, though). He has wings. His glistening "body" --you know some mealy-mouthed editors favor calling a certain masculine body part "his body", right? I don't-- is an unimpressive inch or two.

Of course, an anticlimax follows.

My garden of delights has been penetrated by...
The Emerald Ash Borer

Moreover, the lake at the bottom of my garden (I own 80 feet of frontage, and I pay the same as a neighbor with 500 feet) has also been colonized by aliens, brought in on the feet and in the poop of giant Canada geese.

We wallet-warriors have had to call in the Government, local government, to help us fight alien vegetable matter. There is no other way to compel everyone to pay their "fair share" in the fight against this sprawling, weedy alien who will kill our lake if we don't fight with every weapon at our disposal, including waterborne weed-whackers that look like gamblers' riverboats.

Yes, I know aliens. I could write horror stories, if I were to exaggerate. Imagine if the Emerald Ash Borer didn't want to put his reproductive tackle inside my tree, and implant his offspring there, to eat me from the inside out. (How Alien!)

Imagine if the Thing in my lake had tentacles. (How LOTR!) Or a that it could walk. The Ents weren't the only ones. Did you read Day of the Triffids at school?

But I write alien romances... I don't "do" alien horror.

What's in your back yard?

Best wishes,
Rowena
(From whom not even a credit card commercial is safe from spoofing)

Astronaut kidney stones

If the label at the Johnson Space Center in Houston gave proper attribution to the astronauts who kindly donated their kidney stones for the public to peer at, and wince over, I did not notice it.

One specimen on display was the size of my little toe!

I don't know whether I can make much of astronautical (should that be a word?) kidney stones in my "Forking" books (the sequels to my alien romances in the Gods of Tigron trilogy). With Forced Mate, the carefully (but not personally) researched military uses for urine were left on the cutting room floor. However, I don't think my hero is going to want to be weightless for any long period of time. I'll have to upgrade his mothership.

That means that there wouldn't be a lot of point in tying him into one of those cool, grey, astronaut sleeping bags, which had seemed to me to have some vaguely sexy possibilities... While alluding to bondage, I'd never, previously, given much thought to the fact that astronauts in a zero gravity environment have to be tied down in order to exercise.

As for floaters, did you know that astronaut toilets have a rear view mirror, so astronauts can check before leaving the throne that they are not about to be pursued around the spacecraft?

If you ever thought that an airliner's toilet made efficient use of space, with every surface a repository for some compactly-stowed item, imagine the space shuttle as an airline toilet... without gravity, and without the running water.

Every pull-out drawer had a net inside it, to stop the drawer's contents escaping whenever the drawer was opened. The different space suits were interesting. One which had chilled water pumped through it reminded me powerfully of the costumes worn in "Dune". Another made the astronaut look like a human lobster.

I've thought of "contact suits" for visiting aliens, but never before had I realised that a stiff and bulky (and sealed) headmask would mean that one could not contemplate ones own navel ... or chest. Astronauts have small mirrors on the insides of their wrists, so that they can read the dials in the control packs on their chests and other places. That means, any instructions have to be in "mirror writing".

Of course, this would not be an issue if an alien language was in symbols like our H or O or X which read the same whether upside down or backwards. Then, they'd have to have a Yoda-like concept of grammar, where word order did not matter.

Much as I love Tolkein, I don't think I'll take world-building to the extent he did, and actually invent (and use) a complete language for my alien worlds. Until every book is an e-book --and there will come a day when it is illegal to cut down trees-- pulp fiction allows a writer ever fewer pages to tell a story.


Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry

Insufficient Mating Material

If I had to... could I?

Before I write about my sometimes alien heroines, I research the Earthly equivalent of the situations into which I dump them, and I like to think that if I were their age, in the shape they are in, and in similar circumstances, I could do almost as well.

But could I?

Could I purify and filter water without a commercial tablet or a store-bought gadget on my plumbing as Djetth (Jeth) does in Insufficient Mating Material? I know how in theory, and what I wrote passed muster with my survival consultant.

If global warming reduced my neighborhood to something close to a dust bowl, could I find water by making a solar still? Could I follow my own survival advice that I dish up in Insufficient Mating Material?

If I decided that I no longer trusted prepared, packaged foods from the supermarket, could I make pizza from scratch... on a hot rock?

Well, could I?

Maybe not pizza, if I didn't have yeast, but I might surprise myself. We women may be tougher than we think.

Actually, I used to make pizza when I lived in Dorset. I had a coal fired oven, which meant that I had to shovel coal into the fire box, wait for it to get really hot, and then bake. My paternal grandmother didn't have a refrigerator. She had a slab of marble in a cupboard under the stairs!

But as for doing some of the things Survivorman does.... I'm not sure, and I hope I never find out, but I pay attention, and I'm thinking of buying some of the best fire making tools I've seen him use on his show, and keeping them in my handbag. It won't do much for the shape of my bag, but a bit of extra weight-lifting should keep my arms and my bones in shape.

Insufficient Mating Material contains quite a lot of information from various survival sources and the consultative wisdom of Survivorman, Les Stroud. Like the alien hero, Djetth (Jeth), I took part in competitive life-saving at school. I still have all the badges that I earned. However, when I think back to all the mushrooms we used to gather in the local cow pastures at dawn, and the berries we picked from hedgerows in Autumn: hips and haws, elderberry, crabapples, blackberries, I wonder whether I'd dare to today, if I weren't desperate.

The problem is (for everyday people), practising making shelters by cutting down vegetation is not environmentally responsible, and experimenting with strange berries when I don't have to seems to be asking for trouble... and I don't mean experimenting in the way that Djetth and Martia-Djulia experiment once their alien romance heats up.

Best wishes,

Rowena

Strange Brews

I think my aural memory is very good, but sometimes it isn't.

For instance, I was absolutely certain that I knew the opening lines to The Eagles quintessentially seventies song "Life in the Fast Lane."

Mea culpa. I thought the heroine was terminally vain.

I listened to that song a lot while writing about Insufficient Mating Material's fashionista heroine who was so pampered, she could not even undress without the hero's help, and the slightly brutal Djetth (Jeth).

It wasn't my imaginary theme song for the book, but I felt an affinity.

A couple of days ago, I learned that the heroine was "terminally pretty" (to rhyme with "the hard cold city"). How devastating to know that I have been mistaken for more than two decades!

OK. I will admit it. I loved The Cream song, Strange Brew but I never have been clear what it is about. When I was a giddy youth, I didn't read the transcripts on the backs of LPs.

These songs recapture my happiest memories -- well... I should modify that, but the late sixties, seventies and eighties were fabulous, and that's when I had time to listen to the radio, and when I judged potential boyfriends by their record collections.

Did anyone else do that? Or am I truly weird?

LP-Harmony!!!!

I've also been polling my internet acquaintances about their opinions of Newsletters put out by authors, because I am on a panel speaking about the virtues of Newsletters on behalf of the EPIC organization (for electronically published authors) at the upcoming Romantic Times convention.

More than once as my questionnaires came back to me, I heard that readers love recipes in authors' newsletters. Good grief, people are interested in what I eat, whether I cook it, and what ingredients I use! Who knew?

Music, recipes... now add Linnea Sinclair's barman, Sin.

When you write do you follow the What's In Your Wallet? line of characterization?

Some characterization pundits advise authors to make lists of what is in their heroes' pockets.

(I tried that in Insufficient Mating Material, with good reason. My survival consultant, Les Stroud, aka Survivorman always tells the Science Channel viewer what, apart from his multi-tool, is in his pocket when he is stranded on a deserted island or other hostile-to-life spot.)

How about, What's In Your Drink? (I have paranoid, intergalactic superspy heroes who wonder that, too.)

Let's take world-building to an appropriate level. What do your inter-stellar characters drink for survival, for sustenance, for pleasure, and for a buzz?

Is it basically a gin and tonic with dye in it? Is it green small beer? (That's a fraction deeper than you think). Is it Blue Curacao with vodka? Is water the champagne of the future? Or serum?

Who saw Antz? The Bar Scene? Drinking from the aphids' butts (not that I recommend it, but does it have potential for an alien lifestyle)? There was another bar scene in An Ant's Life. Cartoons can be highly creative.

Well, here's the kicker.

Tonight (Sunday 9 -11 pm Eastern), April Fools' Night, with the moon all but full, Linnea, Susan, Colby and Rowena are going to be appearing in character on the Passionate Internet Voices Radio in order to put the lot together.

We'll be in Linnea's Intergalactic Bar and Grille (a franchise thereof) with Sin the bartender making otherwordly drinks. And we'll be planning a big surprise for Earth.

Best wishes,

Rowena

Disparate things and unfinished business

This image has absolutely nothing to do with Cindy's sagging middle, or Jacqueline's evolutionary preferences... it has to do with mine, perhaps.

Also with unfinished business.

On reading Jacqueline's fascinating blog about world-building, the two books I thought of were H.G. Wells's The Time Machine (I confess... it was not so much the book as the movie with Jeremy Irons as the troglodite-predator branch of homo sapiens) and The Sparrow.

Both books had a predator and a prey species who looked similar. In the case of The Sparrow, it was a matter of convergent evolution. The predator evolved to look like its prey, so that hunting would be less strenuous.

If I'm going to have a predator and prey species in my books, I'd like the predatory males to be attractive, and to have a limited interest in eating prey females.

I can say that. In both The Sparrow and the Jeremy Irons movie, a predator wanted to have intercourse with a female member of the prey species. Now, the female prey wasn't keen on the idea, in one case because it was dangerous... like a deer going to bed with a lion, in the other, because Jeremy looked and acted a bit like an Uruk-Hai.

Now, the Uruk-Hai were buff and ripped, a bit too ripped in some cases, really, but they had terrible dentition and I'm sure their breath was unimaginably bad.

The problem with all this for mainstream literature is human taboos. If we were lion-men, as a society we'd probably imprison any lion-man who indulged his attraction to a deer-lady.

Our culture has fewer issues when the predator is, or claims to be, a god. At least when I was a schoolgirl, we studied Greek and Roman literature in school. We didn't bat an eyelid when a honking great male swan (who was the king of all gods in disguise) gave Leda a couple of double-yolked eggs. Or when he turned a girlfriend into a cow so he could continue the affaire without upsetting his wife.

OK. His wife was upset anyway.

Zeus's other disguises included being a bull (now that is scary, and impractical, you'd think) and a golden shower (!).

For the last fifteen or so years, I've chosen to write alien romances about "gods from outer space" which allows me to cherry-pick items from our culture that I'd like to claim the gods gave us... like chess and fortune-telling. It's rather like the point Margaret made about our language stealing choice words from other nationalities, only --perhaps-- in reverse.

As for the picture, it's concept art from a work in progress and I put it up here simply for a bit of visual interest. I've gone back to Ed Traxler who created my Insufficient Mating Material slideshow to produce a slide show for the e-book Mating Net (a short story).

Best wishes,

Rowena Cherry
rowenacherry.com

Thinking outside the box... or laundry appliance

Ever since a great author who is now one of my friends --but we were complete strangers at the time-- told a publisher that she ought to buy everything I wrote, even my laundry list, I have been wondering how on Earth (or in outer space) I could make my laundry list interesting.

I've done it!

I've sold it... my editor just does not know what she is getting, yet. I'm writing at least three more alien romances --one starring a buff alien hero who does not see the need to wear clothes--, and I suppose that polishing and pre-editing him is at the top of my metaphorical laundry list.

When I say "buff", I mean that this hero's issues are a bit more complicated than whether or not Chewbacca ought to have worn shorts. I think my research will take me to contemporary writings from pre-Victorian times for inspiration, to see how diarists felt when the moral authorities decided that table legs looked rude.

Talking of Research, yesterday I got a call from Bobbi Smith, asking me to fill in on an Advanced Writing, pre-convention workshop at the Romantic Times convention. When Bobbi mentioned that she needed someone to talk about research, I jumped at the opportunity.

Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry